Steel Breeze Read online

  Steel Breeze

  By

  Douglas Wynne

  JournalStone

  San Francisco

  Copyright ©2013 by Douglas Wynne

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  JournalStone books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

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  The views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  ISBN: 978-1-936564-84-2 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-936564-94-1 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013936498

  Printed in the United States of America

  JournalStone rev. date: July 19, 2013

  Cover Design and Artwork Jeff Miller

  Edited By: Dr. Michael R. Collings

  Endorsements

  "Douglas Wynne's Steel Breeze is my kind of thriller, fast-paced, peppered with some well-handled guts and gore, and told by characters buried under crushing layers of paranoia and pain and fear. Douglas Wynne develops this terrifying and violent crime novel with the sure hand of a seasoned craftsman." –Joe McKinney, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Flesh Eaters and The Savage Dead

  "Steel Breeze is intense at almost every moment. It's unpredictable and well written and defies you to put the book down. I cannot recall a thriller in a long time that had me so captivated. Douglas Wynne is the real deal and I'm certain we will be enjoying his books for a long time to come." –Benjamin Kane Ethridge, Bram Stoker Award Winning Author of BLACK & ORANGE and BOTTLED ABYSS

  For River

  When you wield a sword, if you are conscious of wielding a sword, your offense will be unstable. When you are writing, if you are conscious of writing, your pen will be unsteady.

  —Yagyū Munenori

  The Book of Family Traditions on the Art of War

  It is crucial to think of everything as an opportunity to kill.

  —Miyamoto Musashi The Book of Five Rings

  Chapter 1

  There were at least three good playgrounds within a short drive of the Ocean Road apartment, but on the day Desmond Carmichael lost his son for a terrifying ten minutes, he had chosen one farther away, the one they called the Castle Playground. It wasn’t Lucas’s favorite, but the days when the boy would argue for a favorite anything were behind them by then. Desmond figured that when a child loses his mother at the age of three, pretty much every other preference takes a back seat. He knew that he wasn’t Lucas’s favorite either.

  Desmond parked the car in the jam-packed lot and at the last minute remembered to rub sunscreen into Lucas’s cheeks and arms before popping the latch on the car-seat harness. It was best to get the lotion on while Lucas was restrained because once the straps were loose, he’d be off like a greyhound out of the gate, racing past the wooden castle toward the sandbox or the climbing tree. Click. And there he went, sliding down the seat and out of the SUV, then vanishing into the crosscurrents of running children while Desmond rubbed the excess lotion into his forearms.

  It was a Thursday in July—one of the first really nice days of summer after all of the rain they’d had in June—and the good weather had drawn a bigger crowd than usual. He capped the sunblock, slung his laptop bag over his shoulder, and plucked Lucas’s sweatshirt from the canvas bag where he also kept the wet wipes and snacks, just like Sandy used to. The sweatshirt had been an afterthought. Even though the park was inland and sheltered from the sea breeze, he knew from experience that if one of those majestic white clouds trailing tendrils of gray way up high in the blue drifted across the sun, the temperature was likely to drop ten degrees in an instant.

  The Castle Playground was almost always bustling at mid-day, but Desmond didn’t choose it for the children or the mothers; he chose it for the sandbox where he could count on Lucas staying put for a little while, and for the bench in the shade beside it where he could work from his laptop. It was the only playground they frequented where he felt comfortable focusing on work while Lucas played. There were so many extra eyes on the kids and even a wooden fence to keep them from straying out of bounds.

  He knew that some of the other parents judged him for working when he should be watching his son—he’d caught the dirty looks. Let them judge. They didn’t know what he was up against. At least he wasn’t taking the kid to a bar. Sometimes he didn’t know which was worse—the dirty looks or the whispers of the ones who pitied him. Don’t you know his wife was murdered? It was all over TV. Cut him some slack. Whenever he heard one of these rare defenders, he tried to remind himself that it was some kind of credit to the town that not everyone thought he did it.

  On a good day, a day without whispers, he could get some writing done while Lucas played. He had calculated the risk of divided attention and had decided it was minor. That was what he thought until the day of the ten minutes of terror, the day when the man in the indigo hoodie took Lucas on a nature walk.

  Scanning the mayhem, Desmond saw that Lucas had reappeared at the front of the car, a serious look on his face. “My dump!” he said. “Daddy, get my dump.”

  “How do you ask for things?”

  “Please get my dump.”

  “Okay, buddy.”

  Desmond reached over the back seat and retrieved the toy dump truck. He squatted to Lucas’s height and set it down on the gravel. As Lucas bent to pick the toy up, Desmond brushed his son’s longish brown hair aside and planted a kiss on his forehead before Lucas could spin and take off again. His knees crackled as he came up off of his haunches. He shielded his eyes from the sun with a saluting hand and followed the boy into the noisy scrum.

  The cheerful cries and delighted shrieks, brazen shouts and dramatic sobs all clashed and rebounded in the warm air above the wooden castle like the raucous chatter of tropical birds in a rain forest. Such familiar sounds to a father. And that was the other thing that excused the laptop he now hugged under his elbow as he clicked the key fob and trotted toward the sandbox: even with eyes averted, a parent could hear the difference between these sounds and some vocalization truly worthy of alarm. Like the crying fit emanating from the eastern quadrant, over by the swings. It wasn’t his own child, but Desmond knew the pedigree of that particular cry and that it wasn’t the sound of authentic pain. He shot a glance in that direction and saw a mother in big sunglasses and white Capris holding a sobbing, squirming toddler to her breast while bouncing gently on her heels and offering a spurned sippy cup with her free hand.

  Desmond sat down on the bench, took quick inventory of the toys that littered the tiny dunes in the sandbox, and did a rough calculation of the territorial politics currently in play. The box was crowded with three boys, besides Lucas, and a girl. Lucas was clinging to his dump truck for fear that someone else would touch it, the girl was piling scoop upon scoop of sand atop her own buried foot, and the oldest of the boys was flinging sand in the air with a plastic shovel. Desmond looked around to see if he could figure out which parents belonged to these kids, but to no avail. He thought of telling the boy with the shovel to stop throwing sand, but it wasn’t being thrown at anyone for now, so he let it go and flipped his laptop open.

 
The Word file Orpheus was still open from the morning’s predawn composition session. He reread the day’s pages, fixing a few typos as he went but resisting the urge to rewrite. With the scene fresh in his mind, he closed his eyes for a moment and watched events move forward, then opened them and began to type. He’d only written a sentence and a half when he heard Lucas’s voice rising above the din with the closest approximation a toddler could muster to a steely edge: “We have to share.”

  Desmond looked up and saw that Lucas was issuing this ethical commandment to one of the younger boys while dragging his dump truck away from the kid. Scanning the screen, he said, “Lucas, sharing means letting other kids play with your stuff too sometimes.” He watched Lucas grudgingly release the toy. Desmond sighed and tried to bring the story back into focus. The playground was better for Lucas than being in front of the TV, but it was a compromise for Desmond. Here, the noise could really fuck with his mental Wi-Fi link to the land of Make‐believe.

  He heard the shouts of children, the murmur of mothers, the drone of passing cars and planes, and the crackle of the flag beside the baseball field. He tried to dial down the environmental noise and increase the brightness and contrast of the image in his mind’s eye, but with eyes closed all of the other senses competed to fill the void. Now there was a scent to distract him—a strange perfume on the wind, smoky and sweet, like incense, and strangely familiar.

  He opened his eyes and looked around for the source.

  Maybe it was incense drifting from the open window of a nearby house. But why was this particular scent familiar? He’d never used the stuff, never gotten into yoga like some of his friends, and Sandy had been more of a Lemon Pledge kind of girl. Desmond’s gaze lighted on an old Asian man sitting on the bench opposite, smoking a cigarette, and his breath froze in his chest.

  The man looked like a statue, like one of those sculptures of a park bench complete with a bronze man reading a bronze newspaper. Desmond had seen something like that in a city one time. Had it been New York or Boston? The man was sitting perfectly still. Desmond’s eyes fixed on the cigarette tucked between the man’s fingers where they lightly touched the bench seat. A curling wave of smoke wafted up from those fingers for about nine luxurious, milky white inches before it was torn asunder on the breeze. The smoke and, he now noticed, the man’s eyes were all that moved. Everything else about him was somehow still, but not rigid. Not like a bronze statue at all, he realized as he tuned in to the odd figure. There was a deep sense of relaxation about the man. It was an odd thought to have about a person, but when Desmond tried to articulate to himself what he was observing, his first unrefined shot at description was that the man looked as relaxed as a willow tree. Just perfectly balanced in the way that a thing rooted to the same spot for centuries would be. Unmovable, yet flexible, with limbs hanging down in perfect relaxation.

  Desmond caught himself drifting into a reverie and snapped out of it. He wasn’t getting any work done by musing on the old man. And he was old. Ancient wasn’t far off. The man was dressed in khakis and a black polo shirt. His muscles were atrophying, and he had a bit of a paunch, but it was obvious that he had been strong in his youth. His hair, cut to a single length just short of his collar, was swept back, streaked gray, and possibly oiled. Desmond wasn’t great at differentiating the features of Asian people. The man could have been Nepalese or Vietnamese. But no, he thought, those eyes must be Japanese, and a deep coldness coursed through his nerves when the man gazed at him and their eyes locked.

  The man on the bench raised the cigarette to his mouth, the hand drifting up like a helium balloon. He took a drag, all the while watching Desmond, his expression unchanging. Then he turned his head toward the baseball field and exhaled a plume of smoke, and Desmond suddenly knew why the scent was familiar. It was a clove cigarette. He had once dated a girl who smoked them, and ever since they reminded him of warm summer nights in Boston. Before Sandy, before responsibility, before tragedy. He’d never liked to smoke them himself, had tried one and found it too pungent to take directly into his lungs, but on her lips the flavor had been sweet and exotic.

  Long ago that had been. You seldom saw anyone smoking in public anymore. Even more rarely at a children’s playground. Desmond scanned the grounds again, this time looking for an Asian child. The man had to be a grandfather.

  There were too many kids in motion to make out their features at a glance, and no doubt many more who were presently obscured by the wooden castle walls and the plastic tunnel slides. If you were tracking your own kid’s progress through the structure, it was never more than a few feet before a gap between the planks or a diamond-shaped window into the labyrinthine crawl spaces gave you a view of the interior, but to see all of the children at a glance? Impossible. After casting his gaze over the wider area, he settled it back on the sandbox.

  Lucas was gone.

  Desmond stood up and snapped the laptop shut. He had just taken stock of the entire playground and hadn’t seen Lucas, but now he did it again, looking for brown pants and a green sweatshirt. The dump truck was lying on its side, a full load of sand trailing out of its bucket, the other boys ignoring it now that it was no longer the coveted possession of the boy who was no longer there, the boy who was gone.

  Gone.

  Desmond could have quizzed the kids, but he knew immediately that it wouldn’t be worth the time it would take. All they would know was that Lucas went “that way” or something. And the direction would already be irrelevant in a sprawling layout like this one in which streams of running children crisscrossed like ocean currents, knocking small vessels off course or sweeping them along. There was no way of knowing what distraction had drawn Lucas away from the sandbox in the first place or what other diversions might have attracted him since. The best bet was to go for maximum coverage.

  Desmond ducked under a wooden arch and trotted up a ramp to the castle’s upper level. He had seen other dads occasionally climbing as acrobatically as their children—sliding down the fire pole, or jumping from low risers, finding footing in the gaps between planks. Younger men, thinner, too. This was his first time on top of the structure, and he felt like an oaf, but he discovered that the upper passageways were wide enough for him to get around on. He had to put his hands out once or twice to keep running kids from crashing into his legs, but most of them registered the desperation on his face and gave him a wide berth as he made his way to the highest point he could reasonably reach. With a bird’s eye view of the park, he rotated, shading his eyes with his hand, searching for Lucas.

  He didn’t call out, not yet. He looked at his watch and realized that he couldn’t recall when he had last checked it, but it couldn’t have been more than three or four minutes since he had last seen his son. How far could he have gotten? But he’s fast. Short legs but so very fast when something gets his attention.

  Desmond shuffled across a narrow bridge to another tier of the structure and peered through parapets at the woods. A few boys and girls with a young woman chaperone were gathering acorns and pinecones by the tree line, probably part of a school trip. He turned to face the opposite direction, where the parking lot lay, and found his blue SUV. Lucas wasn’t near it. Where the hell was he then? Had to be down below in the passageways, obscured by the planking.

  Backtracking to the ramp would eat up valuable time, so he grabbed hold of the fire pole and jumped to the ground. He was starting to pant as he circled the castle, sweat prickling under his arms, his spine hunched as he peered through the cracks. Calling Lucas’s name from up top would have been an announcement to all of the other parents that, yes, he, the guy with the laptop, had lost his son, but down here on the ground with the kids, he started doing just that. The sound of his own scared, shaky voice made him more afraid than he already was.

  There was no reply.

  He knelt on the damp woodchips and poked his head into one of the openings the kids used to enter the castle. The white soles of a girl’s sneakers blocked his vi
ew, and he heard giggling. He yelled into the tunnel, “Lucas!” The girl startled, then scampered around to face him. Was she Asian? Maybe. Whatever.

  “Is there a little boy in there wearing a green sweatshirt?”

  She shook her head.

  Desmond backed out, stood up, and broke into a jog around the perimeter, dodging children, parents, and trees. He called his son’s name in increasingly harried tones and felt the fear rising toward the pitch at which something fundamental would change. It was rapidly turning into the kind of mounting dread that he knew should be reserved for nightmares.

  A woman wearing a faded Red Sox baseball cap and carrying a rake in her hand appeared around a corner and stopped in her tracks when she saw him. He felt sweat running from his hairline to the corner of his left eye and rubbed it away. Residual sunscreen stung his eye from fingertips that had touched his son’s face less than twenty minutes ago.

  “Did you lose a kid?”

  Desmond nodded and drew a ragged breath. He held the palm of his hand parallel to the ground at waist height, Lucas’s height. He said, “Boy. Green sweatshirt, brown pants, brown hair.” He felt the bulk of the laptop bag against his hip and wished he could have ditched it somewhere, but the work it held was irreplaceable.

  The woman looked at the bag, looked at his eyes. Her features softened as she read the panic in them. “Jeez, that’s practically camouflage in a place like this,” she said, nodding at the stand of pine trees that sheltered the playground, and the increasingly dense woods beyond, which led by neglected trails to the reservoir. The trails on this side of the water were probably only used by the rare hiker who knew how they all connected and by teenagers who wanted privacy for petty indiscretions. Looking at the gray tangle of deadfall, he felt his heart sink. Would Lucas go in there without him? It wouldn’t have been easy for him to reach the woods from the sandbox without walking all the way around the three-foot-high wooden corral fence to where it ended at the baseball field on the right and the woods on the left. But, Desmond remembered, he had picked Lucas up and set him down on the other side of that little fence on more than one occasion when the boy had needed to pee, and had accompanied him to the privacy of the litter‐strewn trailhead. What if Lucas had felt the need and had gone to the same place on his own without announcing it?